(no subject)

"You clip it to your earlobe, it's like a cross between a mushroom and a double-decker bus."
(thymeth linked to this HIGNFY clip for reasons of seeing Hugh Dennis talk about putting his head between Will Self's legs, but Paul Merton's not on bad form either. Also, Deayton wins "terrible pun of the Nineties" award.)

Bookkvetching

So my June booklist will show a lot of entries for Dell Shannon, who wrote a bunch of police procedurals set in LA, published from the late sixties to the mid-eighties. I like the books, obviously, but every time I reread them I get more niggled by certain things about them.
( tl;dr. The run-on sentences, they burn. )

Is this worse than any other police procedural series? Dunno. I haven't read many American ones at all, nor many from whatever country from that period. Most of the ones I've read are from later on, and this being completely identified with the police POV doesn't seem to arise as much- the police are shown as having flaws. (Also, it's possible that the unconscious prejudices they have are more like mine, so I don't notice them.)

Why keep reading, them, then? Well, Shannon does have a few stylistic tics, but basically the prose flows nicely; I like the subplots about their private lives (Alison, Lieutenant Mendoza's wife, is an excellent character); the stories are genuinely interesting, with about four or five crimes being worked on by the department at once, a mixture of tracking down hold-up men by routine work and more mysterious events, and they scratch an itch of wanting to read realistic crimes, but not written in the voyeuristic, revelling-in-blood way which seems to be popular recently; and the LA-forty-years-ago setting is an interesting world, and she draws it really vividly- it probably doesn't hurt that I like LA. I think I'll keep them, and flash my mental "OH DELL SHANNON NO" card from time to time. (And watch Criminal Minds as a chaser. Ha, if that team have any blind spots, the writers bite 'em there!)